I know, I have a very bad habit : never finishing what i begin. This is true for almost everything (except with love, but it does not really matter for what we are doing here). But, good news : 2013 will be a great year, I decided so. It's starting very good : a new job (I'm now a journalist), I finished to build my new desk, I have new motivations, new needs, to put it in a nutshell, I'm a new man. (Yes, really).

Création n°3 aims to embody all that good stuffs. The project was born, as it often does, in the TGV between Paris and Bordeaux (or between Bordeaux and Paris, I can't remember). I really wanted a computer easy to build, easy to assemble, but that is neither trite nor simplistic. In other words, it must have the face and representative of the philosophy that I needed when it comes to computer design. The materials were easy to identify: aluminum, acrylic and bamboo, the same materials that I used to build my desk. The shape was also very easy: having fallen in love with an 500x300mm aluminum plate so I quickly decided that Creation n°3 will be a cube of 300x300x300mm on a 200mm stand (or substantially the same dimensions as a BitFenix Prodigy).

With an immoderate taste for micro-ATX and Germanic (or Scandinavian)design [I know there is no relation], it was necessary that everything is in perfect order. So I needed an intense brainstroming session to determine an architecture allowing me to get a micro-ATX motherboard, an ATX PSU, five HDD, one SSD, a gaming graphic card (even if I don't play) and a complete watercooling setup (with one 240 and one 120 radiators). Additional requirements: hide the maximum cables (it will be difficult), have no visible screws (that is not earned), use only raw materials (i.e. no paint or vinyl or stickers), and for me to finish well handicaps, make it extremely quiet. Anyway, I designed a computer. And I hope it will work.

Unusual digression for once, I laser-cutted my pieces, because I needed maximum precision (and also because I'm tired of being attacked by my neighbor whenever I wanna play with my jigsaw).

1. Creation of the spine

Originally, this piece was supposed to be machined from a single block of aluminum (by 300x500mm, thickness of 20mm). As it proved too complicated (or too expensive), I had to rethink what I had in my mind. This leds me to the creation of a "sandwich" made of 5mm aluminum + 10mm acrylic + 5mm aluminum (for a total of 20mm ). The idea is to get all the cables in the plexiglass and use the two aluminum plates to hide them. On these two aluminum plates (extremely rigid and solid) the components will be fixed, with MB + GPU + RAM + CPU on the right side, with watercooling setup + SSD + HDDs + PSU on the left side. Note that the left and right are set arbitrarily since Création n° 3 has no front, no back, so neither right nor left.

And now it's sandwich time, to check if everything is all right :

Cheating with a laser cutter was not such a bad idea

2. Motherboard fitting

The holes of the aluminium part seem to be well in front of the MB's holes. I'm reassured, I will not have spent hours making me blind with Sketchup and specifications in vain. Because it's pretty stressful to take all measures and virtualize them in my small brain without having the physical products on hand to confirm. Pfffiou. :rofl:

Final little bonus: the inevitable photo of Corsair Dominator (since it would appear that in workblog this is a mandatory step):

And voila. Well, it's not so bad at all (you have the right to think otherwise).
But there is much, much ... much more work to do.